Our new Instagram addiction: the architectural sketches of 21.am

Buildings spring to life in the sketches and videos of Sam Picardal, the artist behind our latest Instagram obsession, @21.am.

By day Picardal is an architectural designer working at a firm in New York City, but by night the instagramer immortalises the work of Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel in jagged black ink.

‘My current project is drawing buildings by famous architects and showing the sketch process via timelapse,’ says Picardal. ‘I get a lot of questions about the process of my sketches, what pen I use, etc, so I thought making the leap into quick videos highlights that.’

Among the landmarks Picardal has captured is Hadid’s futuristic Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center in Baku, and Gehry’s Dancing House in Prague.

But it’s not just high futurism that has caught the artist’s eye – neoclassical and traditional Chinese structures have been given the pen-and-ink treatment, while more elaborate images bring entire cityscapes to life, detailed with hundreds of tiny windows.

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